Nancy Virtue, French

Nancy Virtue, associate professor of French, has been at IPFW since 1993. Virtue spent much of her early professional career researching the representation of rape in French novellas, specifically in the Renaissance and medieval eras. Her critical approach was to investigate how rape narratives in literary texts were influenced by each era’s definition of rape.

In the early 2000s, Virtue shifted her research and teaching focus to studying how the French-Algerian War (1954–62) is represented in French cinema. “I look at primarily French films that . . . either depict that war overtly or . . . that represent stories . . . of that time period without necessarily talking about the Algerian war. This also happened to be a time of very severe censorship: The French government did not want a lot of criticism of their occupation of Algeria.” She enjoys being able to study films allegorically to show how personal narratives represent the larger cultural and political concerns during this time period.

Virtue just completed a sabbatical during which she finished two articles and started collecting many of her essays into a book manuscript. You can find her articles on major academic databases or you can contact her directly for more information.